Without One Plea
by Valieara
Summary: "Do you believe in fate?" he'd asked her once. A study of five years of entropy, expectation, and miscommunication. Spoilers only through the 100th episode.


**Disclaimer: **I own nothing, Hart Hanson et al. do; for fun, not profit; etc.

**Setting/Spoilers: **Everything through _The Parts in the Sum of the Whole_.

**Notes: **I tried uploading this about a week ago, foolishly, in a hurry right before I left for work, coming back to see that there were about ten million mistakes with it, including that I'd marked the language as Spanish (which, obviously, this is not.) So I fixed them all, hopefully, did a quick re-edit, and am back again; so I apologize if you're seeing this twice.

* * *

_Do you believe in fate? _he'd asked her once.

She'd fixed him with a look he would come to love, and replied, _Absolutely not._

oOo

They'd had one case and separated themselves, but in between the sparks at the beginning and the anger at the end, there had been _something_, and Booth had never been able to stop thinking about her. Sometimes she went a week, sometimes almost a month, before stalking her way back into his thoughts; and his mind took her when she came and cast her in a thousand different lights, all while he thought _what if, what if, _on continuous refrain.

But she'd proven to him that she herself was capable of shaking her already fractured soul like a kaleidoscope, allowing it to gently fall into different colors and different patterns when he was lucky enough to be around when she would let him see, guarded as she always was; and it was always striking, if not beautiful. Today, he could only think of the way Shawn had earlier burrowed his nose into the skin at the junction of her shoulder and neck, and her roiling blue eyes over the back of his tousled blonde head.

That led to thinking, and thinking led to Parker and Rebecca and back to Bones, but Bones-as-mother, and he couldn't help but picture her with her own child. This is one light he'd already cast her in, in the time he hadn't known to label as _absence_ rather than _end_. She had been wearing a white sundress in his vision, a wide-brimmed hat and big sunglasses, speaking to the child on her hip in some unintelligible language of baby-talk understood only by mothers and their children. Now he imagined her serious and smiling, crouched next to an unsteady, wide-eyed toddler in a nondescript backyard, with a dragonfly resting on an extended forefinger: comforting in her calm rationality, and teaching with every action.

Neither of these women would ever be Temperance Brennan, but the last image stuck with him, anyway.

oOo

She'd told him about entropy once, holding tightly to his hand as he whirled her around an ice rink on her wobbly ankles, and he'd listened to her talk increasingly rapidly about the fabric of the universe tearing apart on a subatomic level. Words had always been her buffer against change and fear, and she used them like wads of newspaper stilling something breakable in a box, crumpling them up with her voice as if the faster she got them out, the more stable everything would remain.

"Everything changes!" she'd exclaimed, voice rising in note and pitch as he left go of her waist momentarily to take back her hand, and she steadied as he pulled her with him.

(_You're gonna make me fall! _she'd laughed.

_I'm never gonna make you fall! _he'd countered.)

He wondered if she recognized her own words forming the discrepancy between theory and practice.

"Not everything, Bones," he'd replied. "Not everything."

And she'd screamed, and fallen, and laughed so hard she cried; and it had been a departure from the side of her he'd become so familiar with that he'd laughed right along with her, picking her up and pulling her faster, faster, faster, his heart aching just a little bit at the feel of it all.

oOo

He thought a lot about where exactly he was and what exactly that meant after Bones had gone off to Guatemala during his recovery from his brain surgery; and he found, unsurprisingly, that she was at the end of almost every bunny trail. So he shifted the direction of his thoughts, thought about what she really meant to him, putting aside _wife love home _along with _mother of my child_ for the meantime.

"This woman your mind has created is a manifestation of the expectations you've foisted on Dr. Brennan," Sweets told him while Bones was still safely in Guatemala and he was still trying to sort through his memories and non-memories before the deadline of her return.

"It's not expectation," Booth scoffed, but Sweets gave him a look telling him to check himself.

"There is often a thin line between desire and expectation. Figure out where you are."

(Because there was Bones and there was not-Bones, and God knew he couldn't afford to mistake one for the other, to love the unreal vision more than the tangible here-and-now, breathing, feeling, lovingwoman he's known these last four years from the inside out.

But:

Sometimes he thought of her in a quirky black dress and delicate jewelry, hair in an elegant up-do, left hand graced with his ring and body housing their child; but he would always be struck by the utter wrongness of it all, by the fact that _this was not Bones._

And that gave him some measure of comfort even as it disturbed him.)

oOo

_Let me be your partner_, she'd said years ago, a truce long drawn and a deeper friendship only just beginning between them; and the irony that she'd been the one to say this to him, that she'd been the one to say this at all, had him nearly breaking down into laughter or tears or both, the weight of a thousand things she didn't know and didn't _want _to know resting heavily on his soul. But she understood words and she understood connotation, and she knew the beauty that lay within them.

He'd read two of her books by this point, and had vowed never to underestimate this about her again; and years down the line, he will tell her, _My dad drank; _and she will understand.

She will tell him, _the water was so hot_; and in the face of her memory of a stale car trunk rank with her terror and the darkness of all the days she couldn't count, he will not know what to say.

oOo

There was a certain childlike quality to Bones all the time, if you knew her well enough, a perpetually fifteen-year-old girl hiding – but only just – behind her doctorates and degrees and awards and accolades, behind a thirty-five year old woman she never felt she actually was, an impersonator in her own skin.

(Until her eyes turned piercing and profound on him, too full of nothing he could pinpoint and everything he desperately wanted to – then, _then _he understood the weight of her even if he didn't _know_ it, and it surrounded him even as it branded into his own eyes for as long as he could hold hers. These times, she was never the one to look away first.)

She'd given him her file on her parent's disappearance, but he hadn't been able to focus on anything for two days but the dreamy idealism in her fifteen-year-old eyes.

oOo

Booth often wanted to ask her if she ever felt the same connection between them that he did, that indefinable something he'd noticed from day one. (But _Fate is a nonexistent force to which the less rational portion of the population attributes the outcome of their hopes and desires, _so he didn't.)

He remembers walking into a lecture hall at American University six years ago, expecting to find a middle-aged woman in professionally unflattering clothes and a bad hairstyle lecturing from the front, and being greeted instead with his first sight of Bones, bright and serious and young with the skirt-and- blouse-and-chunky-jewelry ensemble that would become her standard, her sure voice ringing through the room with the strength of her convictions and love of her work

(and something, _something_.)

He'd stared, standing conspicuously in the middle of the room between seats, struck by a wave of familiarity he couldn't put a name to, knowing only that if it wasn't _now, _it _would be._ It had left all tenses in a vacuum of timelessness. It was something so intrinsic he'd left it unquestioned: _This is it._

And so he'd gaped at her, taking in everything he could, from the distinct cadence and timbre of her voice to the way she moved across the stage. She'd been beautiful then, too.

But even still, _Do you believe in fate?_

It had been the third question he'd ever asked her.

(_I still don't, _she'll say years later, smiling at him with the weight of all their years together.)

oOo

"Fate is inevitable," he'd told her once.

They'd been driving to the diner from interrogating a suspect, a common reprieve in the middle of a case where he could always be assured that, if nothing else, Bones still didn't eat cooked fruit and would always steal his fries. Some things were a constant.

She'd given him a blank look he'd come to hate at times like these, and replied, "Considering that fate is a overly romantic view of the consequences of one's actions and how they align with one's desires, it's actually completely evitable."

(And sometimes he wonders if she feels that same intrinsic connection he has since day one.)

oOo

"It takes a village to raise a kid," he told her later that year, the thought of all the ways he was failing Parker as a father picking at his mind; because he was just a solid guy who knew about people and honesty and heart and war, who had never been book smart and never would be; and everyone, including Bones (who did not exactly hand out compliments like candy,) kept telling him how intelligent Parker was; and didn't he bear the responsibility to foster that, after all?

So, "Will you be my village?" he asked her, because she was everything he could possibly need, and things he could never hope to be. She'd grown into her strength from a broken childhood the same as he had, but in a different way, the other side of his same coin. She was science and rationale and passion and compassion from an entirely different angle. He'd always thought she was beautiful, but her mind was gorgeous.

"I will be your hamlet," she replied, smiling, "of 800 people or less."

Her own words should have given her an idea of how much she was worth, of how irreplaceable she was to him; but although Bones was great with metaphors, the exception was when they applied to herself.

She was, after all, an anthropologist; and Booth had been told once or twice that objectivity in that field was the key to everything.

oOo

She came back after his surgery and he looked at her and thought, _love _and _home_, and it was all he wanted, because this was the foundation of everything, the starting line of a lifetime without the constraints of definition. Her eyes were so blue.

But:

_You're not in love with her, _Sweets had told him.

_Be damn sure of what you feel before you tell her_, Cam had warned him.

"I love you," he told her, and was sure of nothing else.

But her face startled into something more open and vulnerable than even he'd ever seen from her, answering his words and screaming against them at once. He read desperate hope and desperate fear, and it confused him.

(_I can't change I can't change I don't know how_)

Much later, he'll only think he'll know what it meant.

oOo

("Fate is inevitable," he told her again years into their partnership.

"Fate is inaccurate," she countered before launching into a lecture explaining why; and he thought:

_Progress._)

oOo

"I can't change!" she'd told him.

Thinking about it later that night, Booth laughed to himself through his despair and the memory of her _I don't know how I don't know how (please don't look so sad). _

It was absolutely ridiculous for her to have said something like that, something so blatantly false, when they've both changed and been changed so much in these last five years.

But he toasted her invisible presence still all too tangible in his apartment, thinking he could still see her intense blue eyes piercing the darkness across from him, crinkling at him in a way maybe he'd never been able to understand after all:

"I don't need you to. I don't _want_ you to."

And he thought in hindsight, maybe this was what he should have told her.

oOo

The thing about Bones, he'd thought once, was that she felt too intensely. From that point, everything else was survival instinct.

"I don't believe in psychology," she told no one in particular for the umpteenth time.

_It's a soft science_, he mouthed with her, but his back was to her, so he figured it couldn't do much harm.

She looked at him suspiciously when he turned around, but didn't say anything.

He thought she understood humans and humanity far better than a woman who didn't believe in psychology had any right to; and for a man who had the knack for reading faces and body language and emotion written over it all, he also thought he'd never have the same connection she felt so intrinsically, and from such an unreachable distance.

oOo

He saw her for the first time after that night the very next day, and they moved awkwardly around in each other's space, trying not to stalk each other's movements as they so often did, and finding it more difficult than they had remembered while confined to her office. When he couldn't take it anymore, Booth made an excuse he knew she would see through at this point, and took his leave.

"Booth," she called after him; and he stopped and turned to face her.

"What exactly is it that you want from me?" The question was soft and deliberate, and it tumbled out of her mouth as if it had been preying and pulling at her mind for indiscernible ages until she no longer knew what it was that she knew. He'd never seen her so unsure.

He sighed. "What you aren't willing to give, Bones."

_I don't know what that means I don't know how_, he could almost hear her past and present selves blending together in his mind. There was an evolution to it that hurt to look too closely into, so he didn't.

What she actually said was simpler than any of it: "I can't."

(What she actually meant was: "I won't.")

oOo

Later that week they went to lunch at the diner. Bones declined to eat any of his pie, and absentmindedly picked at his fries in the silence.

Some things were a constant.

oOo

"I can never be what you want or deserve," she never told him explicitly, so he never entirely understood that. _And I can't change I can't lose you I can't. _

(Because the idea that he would ever deserve her, let alone want anything more than her, had never crossed his mind.)

"Let me be your partner," he heard instead, an echo throughout all their years together and all the days he couldn't count; and he thought that _partner _had too many connotations now for him to let her as readily as he'd ever let her.

The irony wasn't lost on him that this was coming from him.

oOo

Sometimes he wondered if she felt their connection the same way he did. Sometimes he took out a picture of a fifteen year old Temperance he'd never known and wondered if he'd ever seen that look in her eyes, and somehow missed it.

oOo

"I knew from the beginning," he'd tell her again, if she'd listen.

She would, he knew, but he already knew what her anguished reply would be:

_I don't know what that means._

oOo

_I still don't, _she'd told him yesterday.

_And I still do, _he'd countered.


End file.
